THE TURN OF THE SCREW • LONDON
★★★★★☆
Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic
REVIEW THE TURN OF THE SCREW: TERRIFYING OPERA HALLUCINATION IN LONDON
The main stage at the Royal Opera House in London offers grand productions full of pomp, splendor, and red velour. But if you’re not averse to something darker and more menacing, the smaller Linbury Theatre which lies deep beneath the ROH’s main stage—is an intriguing choice. It led me to an unexpectedly spectacular premiere of a new production of Benjamin Britten’s deeply enigmatic ghost opera The Turn Of The Screw.
Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic
A new staging created by the exciting opera and film director Natalie Abrahami and the internationally acclaimed set designer Michael Levine, who slowly transforms the entire stage into a lake—a dark, shimmering expanse of water with a calm surface, beneath which something dark—perhaps just your own fear—seems to move.
A technically stunning infinity pool extending all the way to the edge of the stage, where the singers move through the action like figures in a claustrophobic dream amidst platforms of floating beds, doors, and furnishings.
It’s all wrapped up in insanely well-executed video projections on semi-transparent layers of stage curtains—sometimes as pure texture; other times conventionally blurred, like dreamlike flashes from a fever dream. Eerie live close-ups from shifting angles are mixed with mask-like puppet faces in lifeless grimaces and strangely deconstructed music that mirrors a dual world where several of the characters appear in multiple dimensions simultaneously. You feel like a witness to something that constantly slips through your fingers, like a fog that grows thicker the more you try to see clearly through it.
Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic
Brittens The Turn of the Screw offers no explanations, but demands that you grope for them yourself, while the opera slowly tightens its psychological screw.
A young governess, the outstanding young British soprano Isabelle Peters, arrives at a country house to care for two children, and soon she begins to sense shadows, whispering voices, and glimpses of something that might be ghosts—or perhaps just her own growing paranoia.
Everything we see and hear balances between external horror and internal collapse, and the opera refuses to reveal what is real.
Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic
Thirteen musicians drive the twelve-tone-inspired score forward like a restlessness beneath the skin—a slow, almost hypnotic tightening of the reality surrounding the governess.
The children, Miles and Flora, oscillate between doll-like politeness and sudden, inexplicable fits of rage, like small mirrors reflecting the adults’ fears. Add the plot’s two deceased characters—if indeed they are.
Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic
The former employees Mr. Quint and Miss Jessel appear as hallucinations that seem so real that one wonders if it is actually the governess who is the play’s true ghost. Quint closes the play crucified on a raft in the dark lake in a final scene that further contributes to the terrifying inexplicabilities.
The first time I saw The Turn Of The Screw, I didn’t understand a thing. I still might not—but today, the mystique has taken a firm hold on me. This London production is a five-star theatrical experience, which I look forward to putting into further perspective when, in a few weeks, I get to experience German star director Claus Guth’s likely completely different production and interpretation of the work at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin. Stay tuned.
